I'm still here, but this is probably my last tech news item for a long while. Eric/Jeff will try to keep you up to date on the nerdy behind the scenes stuff while I'm gone. They are equally (if not far more) qualified to do so.

So.. regarding this current dearth of workunits. We had a routine drive swap on thumper (our file server, where we keep all the raw data among other things) after one drive started showing signs of impending failure. This unexpectedly caused three problems: 1. the drive swap confused the RAID and we couldn't easily get it out of degraded state, 2. this somehow in turn corrupted the xfs filesystem on said RAID, causing us to lose our on-line cache of raw data, and 3. other systems couldn't mount this filesystem anymore, even after it seemed to be in a stable enough state.

Tie all that together, and you can't make workunits. The good news is we didn't really lose any data, as it's all archived elsewhere, so the weekend was spent copying a lot of raw data back onto systems in our lab. Anyway the long and the short of it is after the dust settled it was easy to un-degrade the RAID (though once again I'm annoyed by the wonky/unpredictable nature of linux software RAID). That took a day to resync. Then I spent a day copying everything off the xfs-corrupted filesystem, made a fresh new reformatted partition, and just started copying everything back. I also kicked all the other machines enough to start mounting this new, remade partition.

All you really need to know is: it's all looking pretty good, and we'll start making workunits again probably by sometime tomorrow morning, if not sooner.

Break a leg on both the proposals and on stage. Drop us a line in the cafe once in a while, will you?

I *really* appreciate your taking the time to explain what the issues are. For us out here in the cold, sometimes it feels like sitting outside a surgical suite waiting for some word on a long and difficult surgery being done to a loved-one.

Just a word of encouragement or an update on progress goes a long, long way toward relieving anxiety out in the hall where we have nothing but last week's newspaper to look at ...and that's regardless of the reputation of the surgeon.

We know we're in good hands, but please encourage Jeff and Eric to check-in. They aren't as accustomed to doing it as you are.

That tour hit some booking snags, so it's still in flux. But I know we're slated to play the Airwaves Festival (in Iceland on October 13th) and the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, UK (on October 21st). And a bunch of France/UK in between those dates. Just keep checking http://www.webofmimicry.com for (hopefully current) details.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

We sent a message to the donor or the router (and the rack space) requesting a plan about what to do next with it, and haven't yet gotten a response. Still I don't think it's damaged as much as not having enough memory to deal with full-pipe traffic, which normally hasn't been the case. I'd rather we focus on reducing the traffic first before replacing/upgrading hardware. Plans are being enacted to do this (including a better splitter to throw away noisy workunits if it can spot them during creation time).

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

This time it happened with no high levels of traffic (at least bandwidth-wise). All traffic was briefly interrupted for 15 minutes and since then some of us can not reach any of the servers. There is a visible drop in incoming traffic, so right now there might be a lot of us being "blacklisted". I made a snapshot of Cricket graph just in case it might be of any help (I was just monitoring my Boinc the moment it happened).

Thanks for all the info Matt. Good luck with everything you are doing ! I've backed out of the project for a while, but I check in every few days to see how things are going. I'll be back later to continue crunching, but right now, just to much going on. Hope everything gets fixed and that the project continues on ! Enjoy your music !

We sent a message to the donor or the router (and the rack space) requesting a plan about what to do next with it, and haven't yet gotten a response. Still I don't think it's damaged as much as not having enough memory to deal with full-pipe traffic, which normally hasn't been the case. I'd rather we focus on reducing the traffic first before replacing/upgrading hardware. Plans are being enacted to do this (including a better splitter to throw away noisy workunits if it can spot them during creation time).

- Matt

It's now the 2nd time that my machine can't connect.

The first time was 09 Aug 2011, 14:46 UTC and it lasts ~ 1 1/2 days.
This was before the weekly maintenance.
So I guess during the maintenance something gone wrong.
Then the next day somewhere was in the lab I guess because IIRC the website was not reachable for some time. Then after the website and the server were again reachable.

This time since 22 Aug 2011, ~ 21:30 UTC no contact to the server.

Maybe the router need a reboot once a week until the problem is solved?

Despite better judgement (being late in the week, and I'm the only computer geek at the lab today and nobody else will be in until Monday) I did just reboot the router. Maybe that'll fix some of y'alls connections.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Despite better judgement (being late in the week, and I'm the only computer geek at the lab today and nobody else will be in until Monday) I did just reboot the router. Maybe that'll fix some of y'alls connections.

- Matt

Thanks for giving it the ol' college try.
Hopefully Eric will be able to attempt that RAM upgrade in the near future with positive results.Always remember.....kitties are all Angels with fur.

Despite better judgement (being late in the week, and I'm the only computer geek at the lab today and nobody else will be in until Monday) I did just reboot the router. Maybe that'll fix some of y'alls connections.